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Football bowl season is well under way, with the attendant media coverage extolling the character-building effects of the football enterprise. All of it is overseen by intrepid coaches instilling manly virtues in their young charges - loyalty, commitment, hard work.

But it's apparent that if a lot of these coaches were the surrogate fathers they often claim to be, they would be considered deadbeat dads.

The most egregious case in point is Todd Graham, the fourth head football coach in two years at the University of Pittsburgh, who abandoned his team to take the head coaching job at Arizona State. He informed the team - which he earlier had lectured on loyalty, faith, character and commitment - by text message.

According to Pitt, university officials had denied Mr. Graham permission to talk to Arizona State because he was under contract, but he did so anyway and accepted the new job.

The head coaching carousel continues to spin as rarely before, leaving many teams with stepfather-figures as head coaches for their bowl games. The Ticket City Bowl, where scandal-plagued Penn State is without Joe Paterno as the head coach for the first time in 46 years, will play the University of Houston, whose head coach, Kevin Sumlin, has bolted for Texas A&M.

Rich Rodriquez, who infamously abandoned West Virginia in 2007 for the University of Michigan, will reappear at the University of Arizona.

The NCAA, which has rules for almost everything, seems unconcerned about the mercenary atmosphere in Division I football, where bidding wars have driven up top coaches' annual salaries to the $5 million range, and where contracts are broken like poorly packed glassware.

When a Division I player wants to transfer, he has to sit out for a year. The NCAA should develop rules that outlaw coaches under contract from jumping ship without the specific permission of the university. Then, at least, all the talk about loyalty and commitment will be backed up by something other than itinerant coaches' egos.

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